Criminality and economic conditions

by Willem Adriaan Bonger

“Sundays and holidays ordinary labor is suppressed, the laborer wanders about the streets, objectless, adrift, embarrassed by his liberty, and runs fatally aground upon the dram-shop. The days of rest are days of drunkenness.

“Our society suffers from this intellectual inaction, which is the true cause of alcoholism. Most men, as soon as their trade no longer makes them work their arms and in some cases their brains, know not which way to turn. Alcohol is their refuge, because it procures for the nervous system sensations which take the place of the absent ideas.”[195]

It is for this reason that the abuse of alcohol is greatest among unskilled laborers[196] and that it decreases everywhere that the workmen begin to organize in unions and political parties, since these lead to the amelioration of conditions, material, intellectual, and moral. In other words, drinking diminishes wherever the proletariat [[364]]is animated by an ideal. And it is also among those workmen who foresee the future of their class and know what there is to do, that the ranks of total abstainers are mainly recruited.[197]

There are persons who maintain the thesis that poverty is not the principal cause of alcoholism among the working classes. As a proof they say that the laborers who earn the least (farm hands among others) are not those who drink the most, and that an increase in wages often brings about a higher consumption of alcohol. They are deceived, however. They lose sight of the fact that most agricultural laborers earn so little that they cannot consume alcohol regularly, that beside the material poverty there is an intellectual poverty, and that a slight amelioration of the one does not produce simultaneously a diminution of the other. The abuse of alcohol has, on the contrary, decreased regularly everywhere that the labor movement has brought about a continuous amelioration of material and intellectual conditions.[198]

To close these remarks upon alcoholism among the workers I will quote the following from Engels in which the causes are concisely set forth: “All possible temptations, all allurements combine to bring the workers to drunkenness. Liquor is almost their only source of pleasure, and all things conspire to make it accessible to them. The working-man comes from his work tired, exhausted, finds his home comfortless, damp, dirty, repulsive; he has urgent need of recreation, he must have something to make work worth his trouble, to make the prospect of the next day endurable. His unnerved, uncomfortable, hypochondriac state of mind and body arising from his unhealthy condition, and especially from indigestion, is aggravated beyond endurance by the general conditions of his life, the uncertainty of his existence, his dependence upon possible accidents and chances, and his inability to do anything towards gaining an assured position. His enfeebled frame, weakened by bad air and bad food, violently demands some external stimulus; his social need can be gratified only in the public-house, he has absolutely no other place where he can meet his friends. How can he be expected to resist temptation? It is morally and physically inevitable that, under such circumstances, a very large number of working-men should fall into intemperance. And apart from the chiefly physical influences which drive the working-man into drunkenness, there is the [[365]]example of the great mass, the neglected education, the impossibility of protecting the young from temptation, in many cases the direct influence of intemperate parents, who give their own children liquor, the certainty of forgetting for an hour or two the wretchedness and burden of life, and a hundred other circumstances so mighty that the workers can, in truth, hardly be blamed for yielding to such overwhelming pressure. Drunkenness has here ceased to be a vice for which the vicious can be held responsible; it becomes a phenomenon, the necessary, inevitable effect of certain conditions upon an object possessed of no volition in relation to those conditions. They who have degraded the working-man to a mere object have the responsibility to bear.”[199]

As for the causes of alcoholism in the lower proletariat they are the same as for the proletariat (if we except the two first named), only they are much more intense. A very insufficient diet, frightful housing conditions, the demoralization consequent upon inaction, ignorance, and the absolute lack of any intellectual life have made of the man a brute who can forget his misery only by drinking.

The same is true of prostitutes, among whom the abuse of alcohol is very wide spread. Parent-Duchatelet says: “The taste of these women (prostitutes) for strong drink may be considered to be general, although in different degrees; they contract it early, and this taste ends by plunging some into the last state of brutishness. All the information that I have gathered proves that they began drinking only to blunt their sensibilities; gradually they become accustomed to it, and in a little while the habit becomes so strong that it resists any return to virtue;…”[200]

Dr. Bonhoeffer says: “In many cases alcoholism is the result of the manner of life of prostitutes.”[201]

The etiology of the abuse of alcohol in the well-to-do class is principally as follows:

a. A part of the well-to-do class, those who live exclusively upon the income from their invested capital, consider one of their occupations [[366]]to be the spending of a part of the surplus-value that they receive. Among the means they make use of for this end is alcohol, which has also the faculty of dissipating the ennui resulting from the emptiness of their existence.